Trade finance shortfalls now appear regularly. Does this matter for trade expansion and economic development in developing countries? Global trade finance has resumed following the 2009 global financial crisis. However, the pattern of recovery has been uneven across countries and categories of...

Existing literature sees opportunistic behaviour of contractual partners as the main reason why rational agents underinvest in relationship-specific assets. We look beyond this well-know holdup problem and argue that financial vulnerability and short-term planning horizon can also lead to such...

We analyze the link between financial development and income inequality for a broad unbalanced dataset of 138 developed and developing countries over the years 1960 to 2008. Using credit-to-GDP as measure of financial development, our results reject theoretical models predicting a negative...

Initially, voting rights were limited to wealthy elites providing political support for stock markets. The franchise expansion induces the median voter to provide political support for banking development as this new electorate has lower financial holdings and benefits less from the uncertainty...

We study how financial frictions affect firm-level heterogeneity and trade. We build a model where productivity differences across monopolistically competitive firms are endogenous and depend on investment decisions at the entry stage. By increasing entry costs, financial frictions lower the...

This paper attempts to reconcile the apparent contradiction between two strands of the literature on the effects of financial intermediation on economic activity. On the one hand, the empirical growth literature finds a positive effect of financial depth as measured by, for instance, private...

The need to absorb windfalls gains and manage them appropriately has been discussed extensively by academics and policy makers alike. We explore the role of the financial sector in intermediating these windfalls. Controlling for the level of financial development, inflation, GDP growth and...

In this paper, we traced the survival status of 94,401 small businesses in 17 European emerging markets from 2007–2017 and empirically examined the determinants of their survival, focusing on institutional quality and financial development. We found that institutional quality and the level of...

Economic development in Latin America has trailed most other world regions over the past four decades despite its relatively high initial development and school attainment levels. This puzzle can be resolved by considering the actual learning as expressed in tests of cognitive skills, on which...